Symbol Matches

Symbol Starts With

Company Matches

From a restaurant owner who hid cash receipts in "seasoned octopus" boxes to a self-proclaimed governor of Alabama who buried gold coins in his yard, here are some of the wildest tax fraud investigations the IRS has undertaken in the past year.

1 of 9

Hiding boxes of "seasoned octopus"

To reduce his tax liability, Michael Chen, the owner of Fune Ya Japanese Restaurant in San Francisco, hid cash transaction records in 26 boxes labeled "Seasoned Octopus" in a crawl space under his restaurant and pretended they were never made, according to the IRS.

While he had an encrypted spreadsheet showing total sales of nearly $2 million between 2004 and 2006, he only reported sales of a little over $500,000 on his tax returns. Chen was sentenced to almost three years in prison in January, and he must pay restitution of $459,105.